Now You Too Can Cook With Marijuana!

Los Angeles website The Savory offers recipes and tips for the amateur chef and bartender. Last week, they began a series of instructional cooking videos aimed at two quintessential types: the foodie and the pothead.

Each Wednesday until mid-October, chef Brandon Coates will explain how to use marijuana just like any other herb — in salad dressing, pork stuffing, even in soup (see the below video).

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Coates, 32, grew up in West Hills, in the far western San Fernando Valley. He studied at Riverside Community College Culinary Academy. In the six years he's been cooking professionally, he's worked at West Hollywood favorites The Village Idiot and Eveleigh, among others.

A few years ago, he began creating marijuana-infused ketchup, hummus and barbecue sauce to sell at the Cannabis Farmers Market in Riverside.

"I don't like the sweet aspect of edibles," he says, explaining that he felt patients deserved an alternative to the classic cookies, cakes and chocolates available at most dispensaries.

When making his own cannabis oils and butters, Coates places the flowers and the fats in a crock pot overnight, then strains out the plant matter in the morning. He compares the flavor of marijuana to that of thyme.

For his cooking series for The Savory, Coates did his best to match the flavor profile of each dish with the smells of strains recommended by the budtenders at the Buddha Bar on La Cienega Boulevard. For his "digestif cocktail" he chose a light and citrusy strain, and for his pork stuffing he chose a more earthy strain from the Girl Scout Cookies family.

"But it's not weed-flavored pork," he says. "More like pork with an accent of weed flavor."

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As this was the first time Coates added cannabis to any of these dishes, dosage and flavor ended up being somewhat experimental. Having tried them all, he finds the digestif cocktail, to be featured in the final week of the series, as the most successful dish overall.